Mitchell Kapor

Mitchell Kapor

"An emeritus member of the The Long Now Foundation board of directors.

"Mitchell Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and designer of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program. He served as the President (later Chairman) and CEO of Lotus from 01982 to 01986 and as a Director until 01987. After leaving executive management at Lotus he served as a visiting scientist at MIT's Center for Cognitive Science and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

"In 1990 he co-founded (with John Perry Barlow) the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil liberties organization working in the public interest to protect privacy, free expression, and access to public resources and information online, as well as to promote responsibility in new media. In 01992 and 01993 he chaired the Massachusetts Commission on Computer Technology and Law which was chartered to investigate and report on issues raised by the problem of computer crime in the state. He also served as a member of the Computer Science and Technology Board of the National Research Council and the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council. From 01994-96, he served as Adjunct Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab where he taught courses on software design, Democracy and the Internet, and digital community.

"Kapor is involved in studying and writing about the impact of personal computing and networks on society. He has contributed articles, columns, and op-ed pieces on information infrastructure policy, intellectual property issues, and antitrust in the digital era to publications such as Scientific American, The New York Times, Forbes, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and Communications of the ACM."

"Other organizations in which Mr. Kapor has played an important role include UUNET (founding investor), the first successful independent commercial Internet Service Provider; the Electronic Frontier Foundation (co-founder), which protects freedom and privacy on the Internet; Real Networks (founding investor), which pioneered the use of streaming media over the Internet; the Mozilla Foundation (founding Chair), maker of the open source web browser Firefox; and Linden Research (founding investor, Board Chair), the creator of the first successful open virtual world, Second Life. ...

"He serves on the advisory Boards of Generation Investment Management (sustainable, long-term investing), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights on the Internet), the Sunlight Foundation (improving access to government information), the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia and other free content projects), the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (reinventing voting technology for the Digital Age) and the Medpedia Project (openly sharing and advancing medical knowledge)."


 * Founder, Mitchell Kapor Foundation
 * Trustee, Level Playing Field Institute
 * Advisory Board, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas

Mr. Kapor is married to Freada Kapor Klein and lives in San Francisco, California.